hannah

Without making eye contact or any sudden moves, and good fortunes allowing, it looks like I'll be done with the full shitty first draft of my current original project before May.

Related and relevant, yesterday I met with someone - a mutual contact put us in touch - who gave me stern and fair advice from his decades of experience at getting his own books onto shelves. Understanding the selling points of a work as independent factors from the artistic expression is something I'd been aware of, and having someone sit across from me and explain that in a cold, harsh, and ultimately sympathetic manner while buying me coffee and popovers is what I needed to be able to internalize that.

I know I wrestle with the idea that the original projects I pursue aren't readily marketable, and some of that's how I came to the ideas by looking around, not seeing them, and writing them myself. Some of that's wanting to see them put onto shelves in a way I know is possible and unlikely, even when the publishing industry isn't excruciatingly averse to anything which isn't a guaranteed success. A little of it's simply the discrepancy between the accepted wordcounts of given genres and marketing categories - it's too many words for this, too few for that, with a protagonist in the proper age range for one thing that wouldn't quite work because of some of the thematic elements and the incorrect age range for the typical audience of those elements.

Beyond all that though, as I said to him: I want to pursue traditional publishing because I don't have it in me for the hustle. I need someone else to do that for me. As such, I need to be brutal and ruthless about figuring out their marketability as something unrelated to the creative ambitions that get the words out of my head.

But man, do I really not want to have to make another social media presence of some kind, again.